Posts Tagged ‘The Creative Assembly’

The last time I wrote a preview of a Total War game – excluding spin-offs – I was excitable. I wanted nothing more than to go Roamin’ with the Romans across enormous, epic campaigns, and the small slice of the game I played filled me with confidence that the short portion I’d enjoyed was a fitting representation of the eventual end product. I was wrong.

Playing Attila it’s easy to see evidence of a franchise revived, not only by technical fixes but through the insertion of new mechanics that reflect a strong central theme. The early signs are good and there’s a great deal of promise, but this is a game about the end times, and until the full scope of its campaigns can be seen a cautious approach is advisable.

A game about Alien rather than a game about Aliens. A game about fleeing and hiding rather than running and gunning. A game that uses a license as effectively as any in the history of the medium. Alien: Isolation is a worthy successor to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic.

Xenomorphs? You eat ‘em for breakfast. Scraping out its carapace with a spoon, between mouthfuls of acidic meatgoop you try to launch a lecture on how actually “xenomorph” isn’t its name. That’s just how tough you are. For you, dear friend, I have a treat. Alien: Isolation has added two new difficulty modes, including one aimed at making everything a whole lot tougher.

Alternatively, if you’ve steered clear of Isolation because the very idea of it send a chill down your spine and sets your skin a-crawling, the other mode makes it all easier so you can more freely tour and world and follow the story. You’re never wholly safe, though.

It’s a shame that the promotional machinery of video games moves so rapidly these days, because it would have been Just Plain Charming had Sega been able to announce this Total War: Rome II campaign expansion two hundred and eighty-nine days ago.

Then again, it would have wildly inaccurate to do so because Wrath of Sparta is set about sixty years after some well-oiled Greeks with CGI torsos fought off thirty million Persians [citation needed], and as we all know video games rarely play fast and loose with historical facts.

The final round popped out as Philippa racked her Beretta M9’s slide. Clack-click ti-ting. That was it. That was them. Over. She spat blood and knew the warm wailing sirens wouldn’t arrive in time. She hauled herself to the keyboard and started to type, each letter booming like so many gunshots leading to this moment. “Warr! Huah! Yeah,” she wrote. “What is she good for?” Heh. Good…

I am grateful to The Creative Assembly for continuing to make big Total War announcements so I can continue practising my Pipfic. This time they’ve announced Total War Battles: Kingdom, a free-to-play take on battles and armies and metal hats for PC and pocket telephones.

“Warr! Huah! Yeah. What is she good for?” I like to think Philippa would open this post with. “Being furious about pencils,” she might say next, “but also writing this post about the release date of Total War: Attila.” My Pip fanfic – Pipfic, I call it – has yet to capture her tone, cadence, diction, humour, or any other aspect of her writing or personality, but I like to think I’m improving.

Sadly, we’re stuck with me writing about this. Sorry. Attila: Total War is scheduled for release on February 17th, 2015, publishers Sega announced today. Also they revealed stuff about pre-order DLC with proto-Vikings and the game’s Special Edition. Pip would do this far better.

As someone who plays games rather than creating them, it can be easy to forget they’re made by human beings with lives, friends and families. While we only usually pay attention to their work, sometimes we have to stop and pay attention to the human beings behind the games.

This June, The Creative Assembly member Simon Franco unfortunately passed away. Most recently working as a senior programmer on Alien: Isolation, he had stuck with the company across multiple projects and teams for over a decade, dedicating a large number of years to working on the Total War series.

What happened before the events of Alien: Isolation? Well, the movie Alien, which you can play bits of in the two DLC missions first offered as pre-order bonuses. All right, but what happened after Alien but before Alien: Isolation? Things went awfully wrong aboard Sevastopol Station, is what. Sega have revealed the first of five DLC packs for Survivor Mode that’ll explore those unpleasant days before Ripley arrives, set to arrive next Tuesday, October 28th.

This calls for the coining of a horrible new term. I’m going with post-pre-DLCquel.

I lead a high-end life and have high-end tastes: penthouse suites, the finest champagne, custom cars, and Cuban cigars the size of your forearm. I demand the same from my video games. The Premium Edition, that’s the one I’ll buy with my many dollars. Gold Edition. Titanium Edition. Blood Red Edition. Deluxe Edition. Ultimate Sith Edition. Collector’s Edition, oh yes; I collect the finest.

Total War: Rome II is now up to my standards, as it’s getting an Emperor Edition. Technically it’s only a renaming of the base game to mark the launch of a big patch and a free new story campaign, but just look at that name: Emperor Edition. That belongs in my Steam display cabinet.

While some battle tactics are outstripped by technology, it’s actually gotten quite a lot easier to perform the above strategy thanks to the removal of platemail in modern times. Still equally as effective at causing extreme pain and temporary, floor-based groan-paralysis too. It’s part of the latest Total War: Rome II DLC ‘Daughters of Mars’, which adds a number of women-only formations to The Creative Assembly’s grand strategy. They’ve also released a free update providing some female units to a couple of factions and updating the roster of the Suebi.

Expectations? Enormous. Alien: Isolation is a first-person stealth/horror adaptation of my favourite film. Not a direct adaptation but a digital recreation, in terms of both its setting and its style. I’ve been starved of horror games in recent years and this one has a lot to live up to. Several hours in the company of the creature have just about convinced me that it might be time to believe.

Given the astonishing care and attention The Creative Assembly have put into recreating the feel of Alien in Alien: Isolation, mightn’t it be sort of nice to recreate a little of the movie? Well gosh golly, they’ve only gone and done that, making the original cast and the spaceship Nostromo. Crumbs, and they’ve got members of the cast to provide voices, even Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley!

And the inevitable drawback for something so exciting: it’s for pre-order DLC missions, one of which will be exclusive to certain retailers too. At first, at least. Boo.

They knew how to dream of futures, those film makers of the late 1970s and early ’80s. The dusty leather of Mad Max, rain refracting flickering neon in Blade Runner, and chunky busted technology in Alien. What are we teaching the next generation to hope for, Google Glass and cloud computing? It’s all too clean and too tidy, covering up the inevitable doom. Thankfully The Creative Assembly are putting an awful lot of work into recreating that analogue “low-fi sci-fi” vibe with Alien: Isolation, as a new video developer diary thing shows off.

The TCA gang are on hand to gab about analysing the film’s concept art, trying to emulate prop-making techniques of the era, and committing VHS vandalism to get a fuzzy UI. It is very pretty.